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An interesting comment came from Bernie Maloney. He wrote:

After reading this post, these ideas on transforming management brought four thoughts to mind.

The first thought: “Life is a series of well controlled breakdowns.” … In the mechanics of walking, there’s a point in a stride where the body is off balance. We just pass through this point so quickly that our minds ignore the imbalance. Another way of looking at this, again, I attribute the origin to Matthew Ferry, is that “Breakdowns lead to Breakthroughs.” We see this graphically in Virginia Satir’s change model.

The second thought: Bill Harris, of Centerpointe Research Institute notes on page 13 of this PDF.

‘Dissipative structures (such as human beings) flourish in unstable, fluctuating environments. The more ordered and complex a system becomes, the more entropy it must dissipate to maintain its existence. Conversely, each system has an upper limit, due to its level of complexity, of how much entropy it can dissipate. This is a key point. If the fluctuations from the environment increase beyond that limit, the system, unable to disperse enough entropy into its environment, begins to become internally more entropic, more chaotic.

If the excessive input continues, the chaos eventually becomes so great that the system begins to break down. Finally, a point is reached where the slightest nudge can bring the whole system grinding to a halt. Either the system breaks down and ceases to exist as an organized system, or it spontaneously reorders itself in a new way. The change is a true quantum leap, a death and re-birth, and the main characteristic of the new system is that it can handle the fluctuations, the input from the environment, that overwhelmed the old system. In Prigogine’s words, the system “escapes into a higher order.”’

In short, when systems get overly complex, they reach a chrysalis moment. The pass through a what appears to be a disordered or chaotic state, on their way to a different organization more capable of handling the inputs.

The third thought: The Cynefin model puts disorder as a distinct state at the very center of a state diagram. It gives a graphic representation to the idea that, rather than being at a different end of a spectrum from a structured state, disorder is at the very center of things, with ordered and un-ordered states around it.

This depiction echoes the idea that there’s a point in each stride where the body is imbalanced.

Our mind is generally programmed to crave order. When something new pops up, the reptilian brain goes into fight-or-flight, friend-or-foe sensing. If it can’t make sense of the state quickly enough, it perceives it as a threat, and starts protective behavior. One path is avoidance. Another path leads to falling back into patterns of behavior that had previously worked well for us.

This return to prior behavior is what Virginia Satir cited as the “return to normalcy” in her change model. The disruptive influence still exists when this path is taken, and perhaps that influence becomes greater over time.

Now, let’s get back to that imbalance point in a gait. Our minds just ignore it. Accepting that, as the Cynefin framework depicts, disorder is truly central, what’s needed is simply the ability to ‘blip’ past disorder, much like minds ignore the imbalance point in a gait.

The fourth thought: At the Meetup where I first learned of the Cynefin framework, the speaker, Simon Bennett, asserted that Scrum, and by extension, ideas like Radical Management, is a means to help a team get out of prior patterns of behavior and through a phase of disorder in a relatively controlled fashion.

To sum it up: The resistance to change in management is coming from the sense that a disordered or chaotic state is imminent, and that state is perceived as a threat to the existence of the current management ‘organism.’

Instead of a threat to existence, we’re truly at a chrysalis moment.

If, instead of resisting a shift, re-ordering is embraced, the system that emerges will be capable of handling the greater fluctuations and inputs that are currently leading to, well, let’s call it, sub-optimal performance of the existing organism.

We just need to figure out how to ‘blink’ so our minds ignore the temporary imbalance.

--oo0oo--

Those are great comments from Bernie. I too believe that we are at a chrysalis moment. However we have been here before and, sad to say, on those earlier occasions, we actually regressed.

A chrysalis moment in the 1980s

In the early 1980s, many U.S. industry and government leaders saw that a renewed emphasis on quality was necessary for doing business in an ever-expanding and more competitive world market. This was particularly striking in the auto industry, where firms like Toyota [TM] were producing higher quality cars at lower cost.

One response was the move towards lean manufacturing which reflected an effort to emulate the accomplishments of Toyota. But many of the implementations of Lean manufuacturing were travesties of what Toyota had pioneered: they took the cost cutting aspects of Lean but eliminated the respect for people which Toyota saw as crucial. Jeffery Liker wrote in 2003: “What percent of companies outside of Toyota and their close knit group of suppliers get an A or even a B+ on Lean? I cannot say precisely but it is far less than 1%”: The Toyota Way p.10.

In terms of Bernie Maloney’s analysis, the firms opted to view the world as complicated, rather than complex. They pursued mechanical outputs and financial returns, rather than improved human outcomes--delighted customers. They adopted mechanistic solutions that were far less than optimal and in essence didn’t solve the problem.

A chrysalis moment in 1990s

In the early 1990s, the diagnosis from Michael Hammer and James Champy was grim: American companies had become “bloated, clumsy, rigid, sluggish, non-competitive, uncreative, inefficient, disdainful of customer need and losing money.” It was clear that the system needed to be replaced by something different.

But what? In 1993, traditional management jumped on the bandwagon known as business process reengineering. The initial idea was sensible: to reengineer processes, essentially a new fix to the system—particularly processes that took advantage of technology to minimize handoffs and enable smaller teams to work on tasks from start to finish. Such process improvements could lead to modest gains in productivity, although the change was hardly the kind of reform needed to deal with the profound structural problems of the traditional workplace. Nevertheless, Michael Hammer and James Champy hyped this modest proposal into something they called “radically new,” “a fresh start,” “something entirely different.”

Business process reengineering was something done to the workforce. For most workers, it made jobs worse. Because business process reengineering didn’t affect the goals of business, which continued to focus on improved efficiency through downsizing and outsourcing, often using fewer, less educated, and cheaper people, the social problems of the workplace were aggravated. Nor was thought given to the strategic implications of the wholesale shipping of expertise overseas to countries where workers could be more easily manipulated.

Once again, firms opted to view the world as complicated, rather than complex. They They pursued mechanical outputs and financial returns, rather than improved human outcomes--delighted customers. They discovered, once again, that mechanistic solutions didn't solve the problem.

A chrysalis moment in 2011?

Now once again in 2011, we find ourselves in a situation where there is widespread recognition that management as practiced in most of the Fortune 500 isn’t working. We have another potential “chrysalis moment”.

As Gary Hamel wrote in his classic article Moonshots for Management: (HBR, 2009)

To successfully address these problems, executives and experts must first admit that they've reached the limits of Management 1.0 -- the industrial age paradigm built atop the principles of standardization, specialization, hierarchy, control, and primacy of shareholder interests. They must face the fact that tomorrow's business imperatives lie outside the performance envelope of today's bureaucracy-infused management practices.

In the earlier “chrysalis moments” in the 1980s and 1990s, firms weren’t willing to admit that mechanistic solutions didn’t work. Instead, they implemented new versions of mechanistic management that were different in name but essentially the same in substance.

The challenge for the Stoos Gathering

The issue for the Stoos gathering is whether we can find a way to galvanize managers to break out of this mechanistic thinking and move into a new world whose complexity is recognized.

Jurgen Appelo writes on his blog how the gathering came about:

It started (for me) during the Scrum Gathering in London, when I enjoyed dinner with Steve Denning and Peter Stevens. We discussed the problem that management around the world is changing too slowly, and we wanted to do something about that. We just didn’t know what.

And so we thought, why not invite a number of people that we know, and discuss this? Maybe together we can figure out how to accelerate change in management. And the idea for a gathering of management thinkers and practitioners was born. We pulled in Franz Röösli as a 4th member of the core team, we picked a date (6+7 January), we picked a location (Stoos, Switzerland), and we started discussing which people to invite.

That was the difficult part.

Constraints

Constraint #1… We want an event at the start of the new year. Many invitees loved the idea, but they had already committed to families or other events in January. And thus we received many replies of the type sad-I-can’t-be-there-but-please-keep-me-posted!

Constraint #2… We want to keep the size of the group small, because groups larger than 20 people find it very hard to reach consensus (see: NewScientist). It turns out we have a little over 20 people now, but I hope some will be skiing when the rest are making world-changing decisions.

Constraint #3… We want a diverse group of people. This meant we couldn’t do an open invitation, because we would surely end up with 3 authors and 17 Agile consultants. We intentionally dug in the darkest corners of our social networks, and came up with some very fine names.

Participants

And so we suggested contacts, voted on favorites, and started sending invites. The result is what you see below. It contains a mix of book authors, bloggers, top managers, coaches, consultants, thought leaders, and idea farmers.

Catherine Louis

Agile transitions in the scope of complex product development

Deborah Hartmann Preuss

Co-Active Coach, Agile Coach, co-creator of AgileCoachCamp.org

Esther Derby

Co-author of Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management

Franz Röösli

Author, Director of the Beyond Budgeting Round Table

Heitor Roriz

Organizing Radical Management Gathering in San Paolo

Jay Cross

Business consultant, author, expert on informal learning.

John Styffe

Co-Author of Was Jetzt? ("What now")

Jonas Vonlanthen

Responsible for Liip Suisse Romande, an agile web dev. company

Julian Birkinshaw

Prof. London Business School, Co-Founder MLab, book author

Jurgen Appelo

Author of Management 3.0, initiator of Agile Lean Europe network

Kati Vilkki

Manager at Nokia Siemens Network

Klaus Leopold

Kanban coach and trainer

Melina McKim

Diverse background in innovation

Michael Spayd

Org. change & systems coach, co-founder Agile Coaching Institute

Peter Hundermark

Scrum Trainer & Coach, Community Leader, South Africa

Peter Stevens

Scrum Trainer & Coach, Community Leader, Switzerland

Philippe Hertig

Managing Director EZI (Switzerland)

Rod Collins

Former CEO, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Author Leadership in a Wiki World

Roy Osherove

5whys.com blogger, writing 'Notes to a software team leader' book

Sanjiv Augustine

Author of Managing Agile Projects

Simon Roberts

Scrum Trainer & Coach

Steve Denning

Author of Leaders Guide to Radical Management

Uli Loth

Member of Management Team W.L. Gore Europe

These are the people who have committed (with a significant personal investment) to attend the Stoos Gathering. Feel free to pester us with great ideas and useful suggestions, to increase the chance we come down from the mountain with something useful…

PS We received many requests from people who would like to attend this gathering. Our answer is always a polite “No”. Self-invitations would defy constraints #2 and #3. But feel free to send us your suggestions! We need your help.